I should be doing homework, but I can’t get this post out of my head. It’s been in there for three or four days, and if I want to get my assignments done, I need to write this. DAMN YOU, MUSE! WORK WITH ME!

Have you ever looked back at your life and seen just how surreal it really was when you were a kid? And then wondered why your little kid-brain didn’t clue into it? Or, more, why the “grown-ups” in your world didn’t clue in?

I grew up in a town that was a Lifetime Movie of the Week. My mom will probably disagree, but really, it was. Let me tell this to j00.

The biggest scandal I’ve ever heard, even with all the Washington DC crap and political things, happened while I was in high school. And I’ll get to that. I need to tangent somewhat to a different topic, namely my beef with Glee.

I love the show more than I can put into words. Kurt’s struggle through small-town life as an emergent gayboi and his relationships with his father and schoolmates have me in tears every damn show. The music, even all auto-tuned like it is, is fantastic. That’s what makes me love the show. What I struggle with, even more than it basically being (as my friend Pamela calls it) “Teen Angst: The Musical”, is that in my high school, the glee club, known as The Entertainers (let it go; it’s small-town Wyoming), is (or at least when I was in school, it was) made up of mostly the popular kids. To have the glee club be the dorks? That makes me happy.

I was never cool enough to get into the Entertainers, and that still hurts. I could have been encouraged by the director to work at it but instead, I was ignored by her, and openly mocked by most of the performers. It wasn’t until I turned 27 and started singing with Voices for Diversity that that hurt started to heal. I learned that I had a damn good voice, nearly perfect pitch, and I could work my ass off to be a really strong singer. VFD, subsequently, has ruined me for any single-gender gay chorus; if it’s not mixed-voice, I can’t sing with them. I need SATB; TTBB just doesn’t do it for me.

So, our choir director’s son was my age. Her husband was one of the local vets, and the one that most people turned to when they had animal issues, and in a ranching community, he did pretty damn well for himself. In February of my junior year, he disappeared. A couple of days later, his body was found in a hotel in Colorado; he has committed suicide. The stories varied; one said he hanged himself, one said it was Valium and vodka. Needless to say, his family was devastated.

Over the next few months, stories came out that the director was having an affair with one of the sons of one of the local preachers. While the son was still in high school. The son was a friend of the director’s son. “Awkward” only begins to describe that. The preacher made his kid publicly apologize to his entire congregation.

Keep in mind that these families were still some of the rich families in a small town. To quote Allison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous, “It’s front page news when one of ‘em takes a shit.”

The director resigned mid-year. The vocal music program at the school was a mess. My heart sang just a li’l bit.

See? Totally Lifetime Movie of the Week. Hell, Lifetime Mini-series of the Year! Scandals in a Small Town!

So, there’s really no point to this brain-dump. You can see why I got the hell outta there. It was… toxic. I love my folks and I love the town. I hate the Peyton Place/Harper Valley aspect of it. It makes me wonder how I got out of there as well-adjusted as I am.

I’ve obviously been listening to too much Wil Wheaton lately. And to be fair, my walks to and from school have been the entire runs of Radio Free Burrito and Memories of the Futurecast, all in the last two or three weeks. If you haven’t heard them, they’re awesome. And if you know him, Klae did a bumper for one of the early RFBs in his “Buenas Noches!” announcer voice.

In any case, I said that to get you to this story about why I’m right and Leon doesn’t think so.

We’ve been working our way through the entire run of Voyager over the last few months. It’s my favorite of the various Star Trek titles (as is evidenced by my first-season Voyager tattoo). Yes, really. Let it all go and just move on. We’re on disc 6 of season 5, on an episode called “Relativity”. There’s some (shocking!) temporal bomb planted on Voyager, and at one point, the ship explodes. When it happened, I said, “Ka-boom. Earth-shattering ka-boom.” Leon said, “Better than Ka-plop.” I said, “No, that would be on a Klingon ship,” and started laughing. He gave me a flat, unfriendly look. I said, “I win.” He disagreed.

Now, in order for that to be funny, you have to understand that the word Qapla’ is the Klingon word meaning, “Success!” It rhymes, more or less, with “ka-plop.” He was unimpressed that I made a funny using a completely made-up language. I made a total nerd-pun and, therefore, I win. Tell him I win. And that I’m totally the nerdiest.

No? Fine. I’ll sit over here in the corner with my friend Sheldon.

DeNiro will play Lombardi

I desperately need more information than this (poorly edited) link. Big thanks to @Alyssa_Milano on Twitter!

I’m looking for this font. I’m not sure what it is off the top of my head, and that bothers me. I used to be able to see a font and tell you what it was within about 3 seconds. This one escapes me. Can anyone give me a hand? I’m digging through 1001 Free Fonts as I’m putting this together to see if I see it.

ETA: Conrad over on Facebook found it! It’s Tempus Sans. I don’t suppose someone who has it could zip it up and email it to me, hey?

Give Mama Some Sugar now sends messages to Twitter and Facebook so that I can get more readers on my blog. If this is the first you’re seeing of GMSS, welcome!

If you haven’t seen Awkward Family Photos, you need to.  It will make you feel better about your crazy-ass family. Though, I still think that nothing will make you feel as good about your family as the Duggar Family will. But that’s just me.

Also, Texts From Last Night is another great time-waster that’ll make you feel better about your friends.

Example (and Jeanne, I thought of you. Love you, miss you, email me!):
(612): So do you want to come over?
(763): Never again opening up the Pandora’s box of crazy that is your vagina. Sorry.

So, my younger brother (the one in the wheelchair) texted my mom this morning, all excited. He came in dead last place in the 5-mile Firecracker Run yesterday. He was the only wheelchair participant in the 32 years of the event.

For your daily dose of OMG BATSHIT TUBA-JUMPING CRAZY, I present to you Time Cube.  You’re welcome